“If you’re sure, Annie—”
“I’m sure.”
BY TWO O’CLOCK that afternoon, they were up to their elbows in files and computer printouts. Annie’s lower back had begun to ache from sitting in one spot for so long. A wonder the company hadn’t sunk long ago from the sheer weight of the paperwork involved to keep it running.
It didn’t take long to figure out that he had a mind like a computer program. A single glance at a column of figures usually told him what he needed to know, and they were on to the next printout.
Annie worked at the keyboard, bringing up the next month’s inventory count when he asked for it, waiting while he made notes on his legal pad and asked for certain ones to be printed out.
“Is this the kind of thing you do in your work?” Annie asked while they were waiting for one of the longer files to print.
“Sometimes. It kind of varies depending on the situation,” he said. “It’s a little bit like detective work. You have to go in and figure out what’s causing the problems. Sometimes it’s pretty evident to someone from the outside with no bias. And sometimes it’s not.”
“Do you have a main office?”
“In D.C. I started a consulting business with one of my buddies from graduate school. We rack up a lot of frequent flyer miles. The companies we work for are all over the place.”
“You don’t mind all that traveling?”
“Not too much. Doesn’t make for real stable housekeeping.”
“Footloose and—”
“—fancy free,” he finished for her.
Annie smiled, even as an inexplicable pang of disappointment hit her. Sometimes it was no fun being right.
“It’s good work,” he said. “I change projects often enough to not get bored. We just got a long-term project in London, actually. I’m scheduled to head there after I’m done here.”
“Oh. Wow. But how can you—” She waved a hand at the stacks of paper surrounding them, not sure how to finish her question.
“I don’t know, Annie. Right now, I’m just following my curiosity. It may not take us anywhere but right back to my decision that closing the company is for the best.”
At three o’clock, they took a break. Jack went in search of a drink machine, and Annie called Mrs. Parker to see if she could stay on for a while longer.
“Of course. Take your time, Annie,” the other woman said. “I don’t have anywhere else to be, and Tommy is perfectly happy playing with all his birthday presents.”
Annie hung up the phone and said a silent prayer of thanks for Mrs. Parker.
“This okay?” Jack was back, a bottle of water in each hand.
“Perfect,” she said. “Thank you.”
They got right back to work, their efforts peppered with very little personal conversation. To Annie, it felt as if Jack was trying to keep the afternoon on a purely business footing. Not that she’d expected anything different, but the change from last night was noticeable. Feeling the shift, Annie kept her own comments on target with the task at hand, corraling back into the chute any thoughts that might attempt to stray toward the fact that he had the kind of strong hands she’d always liked on a man, or that she found the subtle lemony scent of his aftershave appealing.
They didn’t stop again until almost seven o’clock. By then, they had covered most of a tabletop with printouts Jack wanted to take a closer look at.
“That’ll take days to go through, won’t it?”
“I can get through it pretty quickly,” he said.
“You and what army?”
He smiled. “I’m used to running solo.”
Double entendre there, or was she just looking for it? Annie sat back in her chair and ran a hand through what she knew was seriously deflated hair. She felt faded, wilted, wrinkled and about as attractive as a woman who’d been standing out in the rain waiting for a bus. Good thing she wasn’t interested in him. Even so, vanity pleaded with her to do a powder-room check. Okay, so she did have her pride.
She stood, held up a finger. “Ladies’ room.”
He nodded and said, “I think this is plenty for tonight, anyway.”
The damage, when she got in front of the mirror to assess it, was worse than she’d feared. Good heavens, how was it possible to go downhill so fast? Her hair had, indeed, deflated, and she could have lit Bowers’ Stadium with the shine on her nose.
What difference does it make, Annie? In a few short days, you’ll likely never see this man again. The argument, valid as it was, did not prevent her from pulling out a brush and compact to repair the damage. When she’d finished, the mirror reflected back a more acceptable version of herself. At least she could go back out and say goodbye without ducking her head.
Jack was waiting for her at the door to the office, flipping off the light inside and saying, “Dinner. My treat. I insist.”
“You don’t have to do that. Really. I was glad to help out. I just hope you learn something that might make a difference.”
“I’m starving. You have to be hungry, too,” he said, avoiding her statement like a professional skater zipping around a chink in the ice.
“I’m fine, actually,” she began just as her stomach sounded out a noisy rumble, making an instant liar of her.
Jack smiled. “See.”
“Okay, let me just make sure Mrs. Parker can stay.”
SO HE SHOULD HAVE SAID, “Thanks for the help, Annie,” and let her be on her way.
That would have been the reasonable thing to do. Logical, anyway. No point in edging into something that had no chance of ever developing into more.
That said, what harm could there be in two adults having a quick dinner after spending most of a day working together?
A quick discussion in the C.M. parking lot had led them to agree on a place just outside of town called Lugar’s. It was new to the area, Annie had said, but they served a little bit of everything, and the food was good. Standing beside her at the entrance to the restaurant, Jack wondered if one of its merits had also been location and that they were less likely to see anyone she knew out here. Had it been true, he wouldn’t have really blamed her. He was the town’s current black sheep and didn’t plan on hanging around long enough to be bothered by whether anyone liked him or not, but the same was not true for Annie.
If people saw them together, there would be talk.
Regardless of Annie’s reasons for picking it, the place seemed like a good choice. From the front door, the smells were paralyzingly good, the lighting low enough to be appealing, a glass window at the back of the restaurant showing off a stainless steel kitchen and two cooks in tall white hats.
“Fancy,” Jack said when the waitress had left them at their table near the center of the room.
“The food really is wonderful. Clarice did a story on them when they first opened here. The owners moved down from New York. They had a successful restaurant somewhere up there. They were robbed one night after closing, their son shot and nearly killed. They didn’t want to live like that anymore and started looking for a smaller place where things like that didn’t happen so often.”
And Macon’s Point was that kind of place. Over the years, Jack had let himself forget its appeal, living for the most part in big cities, places where the newspapers were filled with stories like those Annie had just described. He appreciated for the first time since he’d left this town the fact that the County Times was more likely to feature a local farmer’s cows getting out than the daily laundry list of murder and mayhem he had grown so used to seeing that he no longer really saw it anymore.
Wasn’t there something wrong with a life where that kind of thing no longer shocked?
The waitress came back with their menus, and they spent a couple of minutes in silent perusal, the question still tugging at Jack. When she returned to see if they were ready, Annie ordered a salad and the roasted chicken, the house specialty. Jack opted for the same and pointed out a bottle of white wine to go with it.
She considered the question. “In all honesty, maybe at first a need to do a better job than J.D. had. But at some point, it became about wanting to do good things for this town. I’m not naive. I know a lot of people think I’m kind of a joke.”
Jack thought about the two men he’d overheard at the picnic and resented their unfairness. “From everything I’ve seen, you take what you do seriously.”
“I guess people make their own interpretations of a situation sometimes. You just have to hope that eventually your intentions show through and people are willing to recognize them.”
“So what else made you stay here, Annie?”
She fiddled with the stem on her water glass. “The sense of community, I think,” she said. “I’ve never felt a part of a place the way I do now. As if I’m not just another cog in the wheel. For the most part, people here care about each other. There’s just this feeling of welcome I’ve never known anywhere else. That’s why Clarice ended up staying. That and the fact that she’s crazy about Tommy.”
That was the second time she’d mentioned Clarice since they’d sat down. Jack had a feeling Annie was making a deliberate effort to keep her sister’s name between them. “You two are close, aren’t you?”
“Best friends. Our parents were killed in a car wreck a few years ago. We’re kind of all the other one has.”
Surprise left him without words. “I’m sorry, Annie,” he said, hearing the flimsiness of his response and yet unable to think of anything else to say.
“Thank you. It’s one of those things you never expect to hear.”
“And certainly not to lose them both at once.”
“No. It puts things into perspective pretty quickly. I learned the hard way that you should never let things go unsaid, unfinished. There may not be another opportunity other than the here and now.”
Jack thought of his own father, of how he’d never forgiven him, never patched things up. Something that felt like regret hit him low in the gut, its edge painful. For so many years, his feelings about his father had been set in concrete, completely unyielding. And with his return to the place where he’d grown up, it was as if a crack had appeared, letting in the slightest sliver of light, making him question his choices.
He put his focus back on the woman sitting across from him. “Mind if I ask how you got to Macon’s Point?”
Annie shook her head. “After J.D. could no longer play ball, he was kind of at loose ends. One of the town council members called and asked him to consider the position. I think he looked at it as kind of a lark. Something to take on while he waited for his shoulder to heal.”
“Except it didn’t.”
“No.”
“What caused the injury?”
“It was actually an old water-skiing injury. Arthritis set up in the joint, and surgery didn’t help.”
“A shame. He was a good ballplayer.”
“He lived for it.”
Something in her voice told him that was all J.D. lived for.
“Did you two know each other?” she asked.
“By sight. We went to different schools, and he was a few years older.”
“Oh.”
“So Clarice moved here after you did?”
Annie nodded. “We both always loved small towns. She came to visit one weekend after J.D. and I moved here and fell in love with it. So when he left, she decided to fill the vacancy.”
“What about J.D.’s parents?”
“They moved to Arizona not long after we moved here. The winters had gotten too long for them. We usually see them once a year or so when they come through on a R. V. trip.” She shrugged. “I guess it’s kind of odd that I ended up staying when it was J.D.’s hometown to begin with, but—”
“Sounds like Langor County won out on that one.”
Annie smiled and looked pleased by the compliment. Which technically, it was. But fact, too, he had a feeling.
“I’m not sure it was the best thing for Clarice’s social life. She spends far too much time with Tommy for a woman attempting the dating scene. But he adores her, and it’s hard for me to push her out the front door when she shows up with pizza on a Friday night.”
Jack smiled. Okay, so she was pitching her sister to him and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Clarice was a very attractive woman, and from surface appearances, she was the type he normally would have asked out. So why was he sitting here at this table across from her sister who, from everything he’d seen so far, was definitely not his type? And how did he explain the pull he felt toward her?
The waitress came back then with two glasses and the bottle of wine. She uncorked it with admirable ease, asked if they were both having some, and at their dual nods, poured for each of them.
Annie took a sip. “Mmm, that’s good. Crisp.”
“Good vineyard. I actually did some work for them out in the Napa Valley. Fairly small family business. Dedicated to making quality wine that regular people can afford.”
“You’ve really been all over the place, haven’t you?”
“Here and there. It was one of the things I found appealing about the kind of work I do. Seeing the world. I mean find appealing,” he corrected himself, wondering at his own slip.
Annie nodded as if she understood, when her expression clearly said the opposite. “We traveled a lot when J.D. was playing ball.”
“You miss that?”
“No,” she said, so quickly that there was no missing the truth behind the statement. “I felt like I was always waiting for life to begin, that the next town would be the one where we really put down roots. Not that I’m complaining,” she added quickly. “I know a lot of people would find that kind of life exciting.”
“You just didn’t.”
She shook her head. “This is plenty of excitement for me.”
He nodded understanding. The truth was just a few days ago he didn’t think he would have understood. Maybe he hadn’t allowed himself to remember the good stuff about Macon’s Point because he’d known he was never going to live here again. But he did remember a lot of it now, was seeing it for himself, and he couldn’t deny its appeal. He knew as surely as he was sitting here that Annie was right about the fact that closing C.M. would change the quality of life in Langor County. A sudden urge to keep that from happening hit him dead center.
“Tell me what it was like growing up here,” Annie said, her wineglass cupped between both hands, a look of sincere interest on her face.
“We spent a lot of time outdoors. My dad and I. He used to take me hiking up on Carver’s Knob. You could see just about the whole county from up there.”
“Really?” Annie’s eyes lit with interest. “I’ve never been there.”
“The views are incredible.”
“You were close to your father,” she said.
“At one time.”
“What happened?” she asked, her voice soft, threaded with concern.
Jack shrugged his best I-don’t-know-it-doesn’t-really-matter-anyway shrug and said, “He changed after Mom died.”
“How so?”
“He married his secretary three months after the funeral.”
Sympathy flitted across Annie’s face, for him or the situation, he wasn’t sure. But it made him want to change the direction of the conversation, fast. “That’s all water under the bridge.”
“Still hurts, though.”
He looked up, caught the caring look in her eyes. Something inside him flipped over, like a door opening that was never going to close the same way again.
“Yeah, pretty much puts to rest any such notions as love lasting forever,” he said, going for flip and coming off way closer to sincere.
“Do you doubt that he loved your mother?”
Jack shook his head. “No. But it must not have been i
n the way I always believed it to be.”
“How was that?”
“Maybe all children think this of their parents, but I guess I just thought what they had was special. Different from the way a lot of my friends’ parents loved each other. My dad got this look in his eyes whenever Mom walked in a room. It was,” he hesitated, searching for the right word, “like relief that she’d come back. Like what they had was so good that it couldn’t last forever. Turns out it didn’t.”
“What happened to your mother?” The question was little more than a whisper.
Jack looked up, met Annie’s gaze, the compassion there tightening the clamp on his own heart. “She used to do volunteer work at a nursing home on Tuesday afternoons. Visiting with the patients who didn’t have anyone else to come see them. She had this Great Dane, Maude, she always took with her.” He looked away from Annie’s intense gaze, feeling for a moment as if she could see inside him. “It started sleeting on her way home one afternoon. She slid off a curve and hit a tree just a mile from our house. My dad had gotten worried about her and left work to come home. He found them—”
Jack stopped there, the rest of the sentence stuck in his throat. To that point, the words had come out neutral, as if he were some impartial bystander telling the story. But he felt the layers of his own self-protection begin to slip away, and he could not say any more.
Annie reached across the table, took his hand and held it between the two of hers. Her cheeks were wet with tears. “I’m sorry, Jack. She sounds like a lovely woman.”
He swallowed, nodding. Tried to respond and couldn’t. It had been so long since he’d talked about his mother. He never did. Never. It was just easier not to because even after all these years, both the pain of losing her and the changes that loss had brought to his life were still right there on the surface. So why was he sitting here with Annie telling her things he’d never told anyone else? What was it about her that made him feel it was safe to do so?
“I didn’t mean to get into all that,” he said, finally recovering his voice.
A Woman Like Annie Page 9